The War of the World
Introduction
The global 100 years’ war
At the centre of this story are the events we know as the Second World War. But only as I tried to write an adequate sequel to my earlier book about the First World War did I come to appreciate just how unilluminating it would be to write yet another book within the chronological straitjacket of 1939 to 1945 – yet another book focused on the now familiar collisions of armies, navies and air forces.
Was there, I began to ask myself, really such a thing as the Second World War? Might it not be more correct to speak of multiple Second World Wars?
European war, Asian wars and civil wars
After all, what began in 1939 was only a European war between Poland and, on the other side, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with Britain and France siding with the underdog more in word than in deed. Poland’s Western allies did not really enter the fray until 1940, whereupon Germany won a short continental war in Western Europe.
In 1941, even as the war between Germany and Britain was in its infancy, Hitler began a quite different war against his former ally Stalin. Meanwhile, Mussolini pursued his vain dreams of an Italian empire in East and North Africa and the Balkans.
All of this was more or less entirely unrelated to the wars that were launched by Japan in Asia: the one against China, which had begun in 1937, if not in 1931; the one against the British, Dutch and French empires, which had been won by the middle of 1942; and the one against the United States, which was unwinnable. Meanwhile, civil wars raged before, during and after these interstate wars, notably in China, Spain, the Balkans, the Ukraine and Poland.
‘Decolonisation’ and the Third World’s War
And no sooner had this supposedly homogenous Second World War ended than a new wave of violence swept the Middle East and Asia, which historians refer to somewhat euphemistically as ‘decolonisation’. Civil wars and partitions scarred India, Indochina, China and Korea. In the last case, internecine war escalated into interstate war with the interventions of an American-led coalition and Communist China.
Thereafter the two superpowers made war by proxy. The theatres of global conflict changed, from Central and Eastern Europe and Manchuria/Korea to Latin America, Indochina and sub-Saharan Africa in what I have called the Third World’s War.
Crescendo of violence
The most that can safely be said is that the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the crescendo of an entire century of organised violence. Even to speak of a ‘second 30 Years’ War’ is to understate the scale of the upheaval, for in truth the era of truly global conflict began 10 years before 1914 and ended eight years after 1945.
In the end, I have elected to be bound by narrative with two dates: 1904, when the Japanese struck the first effective blow against European dominance of the Orient; and 1953, when the end of the Korean War literally drew a line between the great powers through the Korean peninsula, matching the Iron Curtain that had already been drawn through Central Europe.
An undying war
Historians always yearn for closure, for a date when their narratives can end. But in writing this book I have begun to doubt whether the ‘War of the World’ I am describing can genuinely be regarded as over even now. Rather like H G Wells’ science fiction War of the Worlds, which has been reincarnated as an artefact of popular culture at more or less regular intervals, the War of the World chronicled here stubbornly refuses to die.
As long, it seems, as men plot the destruction of their fellow-men, as long as we dread and yet also somehow yearn to see our great metropolises laid waste, this war will recur, defying the frontiers of chronology.
